Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Stellar Consumption

Russian astrophysicists (holy crap I spelled that word correctly on the first pass!) have been studying Xray data taken from several decades of observation. They came to the conclusion that three events they watched were the consumption of stars by the studied galaxy's central and massive, black hole. They estimate that every 10,000 years a star is consumed by a black hole…I assume in any particular galaxy as star's tend to cluster at the center and there are lots of them.

But that's good news for us, because we are way out on the edge of the Milky Way (best name for an galaxy in the universe by the by), so doing the math it should be about 4 billion years before we get sucked in and consumed . . . to start the whole ride all over again.

post script: that's a rather comforting thought, someday we'll all be consumed by the stars, becoming star dust. There we rest until the universe devours itself, pulling all the energy in until it cannot contain it and then explode back out.